Name: Anastasia Sleptsova
Age: 27
Education: Ukrainian language and literature, English language at Odessa National I.I. Mechnikov University
Company: SPREAD, Black Sea Summit
Did you know? Anastasia can read Latin and Old Church Slavonic. She enjoys going to the opera and consequently learned Italian.
At the age of 26, Anastasia Sleptsova has already built a name for herself for developing and promoting Ukraine’s information technology sector.
Her first exposure to Ukraine’s IT world was when she worked as a tech supporter at an outsourcing company. Sleptsova then moved to work in business development in one of Ukraine’s largest outsourcing companies.
It was her job to communicate with different international bodies, businesspeople and conference holders in order to promote the company. It was there that she realized that she could have a hand in developing Ukraine’s IT sector: “I thought everything that was going on was so cool, but there weren’t enough meetups or conferences.”
So together with friends, Sleptsova organized the first IT meetup in Odesa, resulting in several e-governance hackathons and IT-related social projects. The meetups became so popular that they started to attract people from across Ukraine. Only five people attended the first meetup, she said. Now they get crowds as large as 200 people.
“The main idea is to develop ideas by having a community. The biggest problem in Ukraine is the developers’ lack of business skills and global knowledge,” said Sleptsova. With this in mind, her colleague Karina Lapina has created partnerships with the likes of the Columbia Business School to train developers in how to present and monetize their products.
By 2015, one thing had led to another and Sleptsova decided to start an international English-language conference: the Black Sea Summit. Her plan is to develop the conference for at least the next five years. International conferences, said Sleptsova, can open Ukraine up to the world.
“The aim is to show people that Ukraine is not only about the economic crisis and the war. That we have a lot of bright ideas and talent. We want people to come to Ukraine for business trips, not just to check out girls,” said Sleptsova.
On the sidelines of the forum in 2016, Sleptsova initiated Start Up Odesa, an umbrella for all the IT startups in the region. Mentoring the new venture is Start Up Amsterdam, civil society members and the Odesa City Council will also help out.
“I like to meet people who work in the IT sector because they play outside the rules. I want them to be a drive of the country. Everyone should start from themselves, by doing a little bit.”
